Tbe study of gender attnbutes, masculinity and femininity, bas comprised a major researcb program in twentieth-century psychology Historical examination reveals that this research program has produced not cumulative discovery but a pattern of repetition and reification Researchers have repeatedly attempted to ensure the reahtv of masculmity and femininity, and have even introduced methodological techniques that privilege their observational statements on that reality Similar patterns have occurred m tbe case of androgyny research, despite expectations that the androgyny construct would remedy the shortcomings of masculinity and femininity concepts When analyzed in historical context, these gender concepts are found to share ethnopsychological ongins-roots m social practices and prescriptions Contextual analysis also provides telhng details about researchers normative interests If we choose to terminate sucb fruitless ventures and to generate novel understandings of the social world, then we must undertake critical self-appraisal and adopt a new metatheoretical grounding When the protagonist of Virginia Woolf s Orlando is suddenly transformed from male to female, he/she has minimal difficulty adjusting to a new form The recent shift from the bipolar, apparently antiquated concepts of masculinity and femininity to one of androgyny, though purportedly a major reformulation, actually intimates a similar facile accommodation While different m kind, both changes rely on mundane oppositions-those cultural concepts tbat ordinarily signify masculine and feminine Both changes constitute fairly undramatic revisions rather than radical transformationsThe study of femininity and masculinity, comprising a massive scientific project across 90 years of expenmental psychology, depicts a curious recurrence of these cultural concepts The research exemplifies the repetition, with minor modifications, of several central stipulations about masculinity and femininity Conventional literaRequests for reprints should be sent to J C Morawski,
Psychology is experiencing what many deem a "crisis," often called a "replication crisis." In response and with impressive speed, technical changes are being introduced to remedy perceived problems in data analysis, researcher bias, and publication practices. Yet throughout these large-scale renovations of scientific practice, scarce attention is given to philosophical and theoretical commitments as potential factors in the crisis problems. Analysis of involved psychologists' understandings of scientific crisis, replication, and epistemology indicates the need for philosophical examinations. Likewise warranting close analyses are the associated assumptions about objectivity, credibility, and ontology (the nature of psychological phenomena). Such lacuna in the crisis interrogations constitute opportunities for researchers with expertise in the philosophy and theory of psychology to contribute to the science's immediate problems and collaborate more closely with experimental psychologists. Public Significance StatementPsychology's current crisis has affected the science's credibility with the public as well as researchers' confidence in their scientific practice. While technical adjustments are being made to remedy some of the problems, there remain significant philosophical and philosophical questions. Attention to these questions promises to help clarify psychologists' conceptualizations of objectivity, credibility, and the psychological phenomena under study. Such clarification can be extended to enhance the public's understanding of psychology and its products.
Psychologists tend to examine their activities in experimentation with the same objective scientific attitude as they routinely assume in the experimental situation. A few psychologists have stepped outside this closed expistemic practice to undertake reflexive analysis of the psychologist in the laboratory. Three cases of such critical reflexive analysis are considered to better understand the strategies and consequences of confronting what Steve Woolgar has called ‘the horrors of reflexivity’. Reflexive work of William James, Horace Mann Bond, and Saul Rosenzweig are examined: working in the early years of modern experimental psychology these scientists identified limitations in the dominant natural science model of experimentation. Attending to the scientist's own cognitions, social status, and unconscious processes respectively, James, Bond, and Rosenzweig criticized this natural science model and presented methodological and epistemic alternatives. The relative neglect of their constructive observations underscores the resistance to addressing psychology's reflexive dimensions.
Behavior a t Yale's Institute of Human Relations By J. G. Morawski* IN 1929 JAMES ANGELL, president of Yale, announced plans for a unique teaching and research center for those fields "directly concerned with the problems of man's individual and group conduct. The purpose is to correlate knowledge and coordinate technique in related fields that greater progress may be made in the understanding of human life.. The time has certainly come once again to attempt a fruitful synthesis of knowledge." The New York Times described the experiment as dismantling the disciplinary "Great Wall of China" and compared it with the Renaissance transformation of knowledge.1 The Institute of Human Relations (IHR), as the center was named, received over $4.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for its first decade of operation. The IHR was to be more than a research haven for social scientists, doctors, and lawyers: it was in actuality an experiment, an attempt to construct a cooperative and integrated scientific enterprise. The Institute's objective-an integrated, synthetic science, cooperatively managed and oriented to eventual practical applications-drew upon new ideals in the human sciences. By the early twentieth century postulates of moral autonomy and rational cognition seemed to be yielding to complex conceptions of action that stressed multiple, interdependent causation. Nineteenth-century idealism and positivism seemed to be giving way to ideas about an antireductionist, antiformalist, and pragmatic science. The limits of rationality and of simple mechanical models of action were indicated by innovations in biology and physics and reiterated in strong fashion by Freud and his associates.2 To the founders of the Institute these new conceptions suggested the need to transcend disciplinary boundaries and emphasize unification over specialization.
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